Best hardware for a replacement desktop?

[Paul Pathiakis]

 Ok... so now onto other points of relevancy....  (I believe Ralf and I have had our say... :D )

One of the nicest, inexpensive cases I found is a screwless case made by Rosewill called the Challenger 3.
Everything is well-laid out.  The PSU is on the bottom with the appropriate filter, 3 lg, quiet fans on the front, rear, top.  

The ability to put 5 3.5" drives in a side-to-side orientation via pop in rails on the side, two more 2.5" drives in a std front to rear orientation and two 5.25" drives at the top, it's pretty useful.  

The only shortcoming I find in the case is the length of the front USB cable not being able to reach all the way to the lower far corner.... (if you have a USB header closer than the most extreme distance from the upper front of the case, it's really a nice work of design and if all your components are quiet, the case is REALLY quiet.)
I bought the Challenger, Challenger 2 and now Challenger 3.... the original was a nice design and the subsequent versions have had minor improvements.  I have a total of 4 in the house.... two are v2 and two are v3.
One thing to remember, if you have adapter for SAS (yes, I have some) to put on the drive or any other adapter, it's a tight squeeze.  The case on the 3.5" is narrow in that it accepts SATA/Molex connectors and a SATA adapter easily.  Large adapters can be a really tight squeeze.  YMMV.
P.
PS - My new server case is a Nanoxia Deep Silence 1 v2.  It was one of the v2 previous.

    On Tuesday, July 30, 2019, 6:27:57 AM EDT, Aryeh Friedman <aryeh.friedman at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 

On Mon, Jul 29, 2019 at 10:50 PM Aryeh Friedman <aryeh.friedman at gmail.com> wrote:
Item                                                        Price                Comments--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------MSI B450 Tomahawk (motherboard)        85                    No complaints beyond not very clear instructions about what screws to use for what purpose and the manual has the build order wrong IMO (attach everything before putting in case).... vmm(4) loads fine have not yet tried bhyve/vbox yet

Just did a quick test of installing a fbsd 12-release instance on vbox works fine (with NAT'ed NIC's)... the next and final test (at this point I see no reason why it wouldn't work unless the bhyve command line has changed since 11.3) is install PetiteCloud and set up some boot time vm's on it  (finally got some time to update PC to handle non-Unix-like VM's so I guess it is time to start writting some code again ;-))
-- 
Aryeh M. Friedman, Lead Developer, http://www.PetiteCloud.org